


the mind alone (without corporeal friend)

by gemstonecircles



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Developing Relationships, F/M, Fluff and Angst, HEAVY warning for illness, Long-distance relationships, No smut just pining, TW: Hospitals, TW: major illness, bicurious hormonal teenage Relena, lots of letters, no acting on it, she just starts noticing boobs, so much pining, tw: quarantine, video calls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:16:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29670594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gemstonecircles/pseuds/gemstonecircles
Summary: Heero discovered that he loved how the letters found him, sometimes weeks or even months later.
Relationships: Duo Maxwell/Hilde Schbeiker, Relena Peacecraft/Heero Yuy
Comments: 19
Kudos: 46
Collections: Church of Lemons 2021





	the mind alone (without corporeal friend)

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings: (because we are in a global pandemic) there is sickness and quarantining in this, as well as a virus outbreak. That's not really out of the GW trope wheelhouse, but under the circumstances, I would rather not upset anyone. <3 Please keep yourselves physically and mentally safe! <3

1.

The first time she kissed him was anything but traditionally romantic. The station was loud and smelled of shuttle fumes and stale air. The loudspeakers announced arrivals and departures in monotone, and luggage and passengers rushed in all directions. His hands didn’t seem to know quite where to go and so they ended up raised in a type of surrender, and she had somehow managed to trip slightly and stand on her own foot, one hand clutching the waist of his jacket to prevent toppling over. They were standing together at the shuttle platform that would take him to L2 and away from the protective shelter of her home in Bruxelles-Ville. She reached out at the last moment, to quickly press her lips against his, and then step back, face flushed, to wish him goodbye. It was, in its brief, sweet way, explosive. 

Heero knew, through the gossip of her classmates, that Relena had been regarded at school as a bit sexless, a pretty, biddable doll, with little autonomy and even less fire. Even when the fire showed itself, when the backbone of steel became clear to the entire world, the veneer of coldness remained. She appeared to the world, as she had to her classmates, as beautiful and kind, but cold.

Heero couldn’t think of any descriptor less suitable. Relena was all warm hands and heart and warm, soft lips pressing against his, the heat of her body radiating even through the layers of clothing and air and he thought. 

Oh.

_This._

* * *

2.

Heero discovered that he loved how the letters found him, sometimes weeks or even months later. 

Relena had told him, as he left her for that last time, that connection was important, that identity was important, and that these were the things he needed to find. There was a pull, a security in the idea of staying with _her_. But when he mentioned it, when he floated the possibility of following Wufei’s example and joining the Preventers, there was a hesitation in her voice before she answered. 

“I... I think that working with the Preventers will be very good for Mr. Chang,” she said, smiling a little sadly. “Commander Une understands working for redemption, and she and Major Po also won’t put up with...” she hesitated slightly, “…any of his questionable ideas about gender relations.”

Heero snorted a laugh as Relena primly took another sip of tea, a definite twinkle in her eyes.

“ _However,”_ she continued, placing the teacup down and clasping her hands in her lap, “I don’t think that is what you need to… what you _should_ do.” She raised her head and locked sad, steady eyes with his. “I would love nothing more than for you to stay here with me. _For_ me. But you have given up your childhood and your innocence and your wellness, and you have rebuilt your faith in yourself and others from scratch. You have both done things and had things done to you that I simply can’t imagine. That very few people can imagine.”

“What I want more than anything,” and she reached out a soft, gentle hand to squeeze his, “is your happiness. Your wholeness. I think you need to go and see this world for yourself, with your own eyes. I don’t want to force you to see it through mine.”

He looked down at his own hand in hers. She was right, of course. It would be too easy to fall into her orbit and fail to ever become more than her shooting star, destined to shine brightly in her life and just as quickly burn away into nothingness.

Her gentle clasp suddenly grew stronger, almost too hard. 

“But no matter where you go, or who you find yourself becoming, you will always have a place here, with me. Whenever you need it. Or whenever you want it.”

In a secret, frightened corner of his heart, he had wondered if she was sending him away. If he was a liability to her, an embarrassment. But then the letters started coming, most often arriving at a place before he did. He found them waiting in a pile of junk mail in Duo’s apartment entryway. Propped up tastefully against a vase in Quatre’s guest room. Thrown at him like a dart across the back of a circus tent by a bemused Catherine Bloom. If he stayed in one place for a while, sometimes he would send each temporary address by comm message and then would find himself waiting impatiently each day for the post.

Each letter was always the same on the outside; plain, heavy white envelopes with a laser seal, but the pages within were filled with news, thoughts, dreams, ambitions. He always kept the letters, but hid them, knowing how much of herself she was trusting to him by putting pen to paper. He was given glimpses of her life, triumphs, and frustrations, and saw the unsaid troubles and worries that hid behind the words. He saw the frustration of building a relationship with her brother, who alternated between aloof and over-protective. He felt her reluctance in compromising on important policies. He shared her sadness at feelings of isolation and irrevocable separation from her peers.

He watched as the frustration at not being taken seriously politically developed into fears being taken _too_ seriously, of missteps magnified and shame over small failures. From the outside, he saw these stumbles for what they were: small blips in a narrative that did nothing to detract from her stable popularity among the citizens of both Earth and the Colonies. The letters, however, revealed that Relena saw herself as struggling, as ineffectual, and sometimes even _helpless_ in pushing the policies that she advocated. He hoped that one day she would be able to sit in a noisy bar and see the expressions of everyday people as they watched her speeches, or the banter of political chatter that, even when fiercely in disagreement with her, was rarely hateful. 

Every letter started the same, 

_“Dear Heero,”_

but he found himself obsessing over possible variations in the valediction.

When _“Most Sincerely Yours,”_ shifted to _“With Deepest Affection,”_ he at first considered that it might be code, that she might be in danger and trying to signal for help. However, over a vid- comm the next day she seemed healthy and vibrant. Her color was a bit high, but she seemed otherwise unharmed. It was mysterious and troubling, but he put it out of his mind until _“With Deepest Affection”_ gave way to _“With Love.”_

The last made his heart race and palms sweat, and he wandered aimlessly around the streets of L2 for a few hours in the artificial twilight, pages crumpling in his hands. It _was_ a code, he realized, a way of slowly transmitting emotional information. And if she was writing to him in code, the only reasonable course of action was to unlock the code and send a message back.

He sent her letters less often, often messaging her by comm-link, keeping up with their monthly vid-comms, but he did try to write. He didn’t have her gift for conversation and he found that his letters felt stilted and rarely filled a single page. 

He had never bothered with a salutation or valediction, assuming that she would know who it was to (it was addressed to her after all) and who it was from by the block- lettered _“HEERO”_ marking the end of each missive.

As he began to research, he realized that there was a wealth of information hidden in the seemingly innocuous openings and closings of correspondence. 

Seemingly banal words could indicate friendship, dislike, irritation, hatred, or adoration. There was a minefield of what could be construed as too much, too little, or emotionally off-key. 

He had a letter waiting to send to her, written and waiting on Quatre’s guest room desk. He hesitated briefly, then set his shoulders. 

_“Love,_

_Heero.”_

Her next letter had a tentative stain beside the signature, and when he touched it, he found it was slightly sticky. When he looked closer, he saw that it was the light lipstick impression of her lips. He folded that letter, and, instead of hiding it with the others, kept it tucked away in the breast pocket of his shirt. 

* * *

3.

The problem with building a better world, Relena thought, was the lack of personal time, or even the ability to predict where one would be one week to the next. Her crisp, designer suitcases were scuffed on every surface, and marked with fading shuttle stickers and baggage codes that she hadn’t had the time or energy to peel off between trips. The recycled air had at some point become so normalized that fresh air smelled sweet and odd, and her sleep cycle so interrupted that she learned to fall asleep when she lay down, circadian rhythms be damned. She usually remembered to take off her makeup first, but sometimes the exhaustion was simply too much. She usually checked into her room as soon as she arrived, showered, went over her schedule while drying her hair, and immediately tried to sleep a bit to be as fresh as she could for whatever meetings and events were planned.

Tonight, however, she was making an exception, because it was five minutes from 14:00 Standard Time on the first of the month. That meant that she had to be ready, because at 14:00, she would hear the soft pings signaling an encrypted video call. 

She scrambled to finger comb her hair into place, scowled at the dark circles under her eyes, settled into her sterile hotel room chair to flip up the vid-comm screen on her portable phone-tablet, and waited. The image took a moment to settle, and his face always first appeared as a scowl, as if the screen had offended him somehow, but then softened when he saw her.

“Hi,” she whispered, breathless.

“Hi,” he murmured back.

Their first few calls, years ago, had been awkward, stilted, and with large swaths of silence that Relena had desperately attempted to fill. She wasn’t sure if he would call again, after the first fumbling attempts at conversation, but like clockwork, no matter where they were, he would call. She sometimes caught glimpses of the lives of other pilots and acquaintances, and there was a small voyeuristic pleasure at looking into other lives. She hadn't known all of them particularly well, although she and Quatre were developing a closer friendship now that they ran in similar circles.

Duo she had always liked very much for his easy manner and straight-forward talk, and it was a bit thrilling to get a small glimpse of his home in the background of calls. There was a cozy jumble of electronics piled everywhere, and his loud banter with his girlfriend often carried on in the background of her calls with Heero. It made her smile, knowing that Heero was trying to form connections, solidify friendships, and build kinship with those he knew. Sometimes, when Duo’s voice rose to a particularly high volume, Heero would wince slightly at the sound, and something about that very human reaction always made her dissolve into giggles. 

Heero often called from Duo’s home, but just as often from other places as well. The backdrop was sometimes the wall of a dark circus tent, or the bright, tasteful colors of Quatre’s guestroom, and once even a room she recognized as a conference room in the Beijing Preventers office. His travels on the Colonies gave way to travels around Earth and he slowly began to grow more talkative, telling her of the things he had seen, the people he had met. 

They never talked about her work, and she was grateful. After media fall-outs from unwise decisions or poorly chosen words on her part, she could see in the line in his brow, and see in the way that he scanned her face that he was pondering if he should say something. She knew the media routinely forgot that, in the beginning, she was still a child. Even as time passed and she grew from a savant into a practiced politician, she wondered if they ever stepped back to think that she was still so young. She had noticed, with growing appreciation through the years, when Heero chose to talk of other things, even peppering in stories of friendly animals or interesting foods, to distract her from the ticker tape summations of any missteps. 

She liked to watch the change in him, through the calls, watch him slowly growing into himself. His hair had recently been cropped shorter, inexpertly. It had probably been done by Heero himself, but it brought out the sharpening of his jaw and the growth of his shoulders. He would never be a tall man, she thought, but he had filled into wiry muscles and sharp angles in a way that suited him. He once answered a call while toweling off his hair after a shower, and she had to stare very hard at the hands clasped in her lap to keep her eyes from wandering down the slope of his still dripping neck and past the towel hanging around his shoulders to catch a glimpse of his chest. She felt odd and guilty, as if her physical feelings for him were an unfair addition to the burden of trauma and reinvention that he was already navigating.

Discovering desire had alarmed her. She had been fascinated with Heero since the first moment that she had pulled off his helmet on the shore, from the moment he had turned her life upside down and inside out. But adolescent adoration and fixation were far from the intimate longing and tug inside her stomach that she felt when she saw him now. She felt breathless and unsteady. She hadn’t been sure at first how her youthful love and admiration were evolving, and had been troubled at the change. How could she possibly love him more than she did already? And as the new, frightening feelings became familiar, the worry of reciprocation bubbled up inside of her. How could she possibly long for more than he already gave her?

There had been a brief, frustrating period after her eighteenth birthday where she started to _notice_ , not only Heero, (although he was always first in her mind), but _everyone_. Dorothy’s blossoming figure was suddenly deeply distracting, and the frankly visible contours of breast through her friend’s silk blouses sent a rush of blood to her face. An annual birthday vid-comm from a luminous Catherine Bloom and a shirtless, unexpectedly tall, broad, and stubble-faced Trowa Barton had led to her staring at the tiles in a cold shower for longer than the call itself. Major Po’s short, tight dress and long legs during a covert security detail had left her blushing and stammering in admiration for the entire evening. 

Even with this sudden awareness, nothing was as fascinating, infuriating, or distracting as watching the subtle changes in Heero, the first shadow of slight facial hair, the deepening of his voice, the growth of bone and muscle. As the first flush of hormones faded, she was able to look friends in the eye again, but Heero remained a flutter in her chest and a fish-hook under her navel, causing a sudden lurch in her belly whenever their eyes met, even though they were thousands of kilometers apart. 

They had only been able to meet in person occasionally, due to a combination of schedules and mutual reservedness. Their time on L4 periodically overlapped and they spent hours exploring Quatre’s manicured gardens, talking quietly, knuckles brushing as they walked side by side. Heero passed through Bruxelles-Ville more rarely, his visits with Preventer Chang always tense and emotional, and he often sat in brooding silence over coffee with her afterwards, starting out of a reverie only when she reached out to touch an arm or hand. They had once gone to the circus together on L3, and she had jumped in tension watching Trowa and Catherine, spilling popcorn all over herself, and then melted like butter as she watched him burst into helpless, unbridled laughter for the first time. 

She always felt light-headed at seeing him, measuring their leap-frogging heights over the years by the angle at which their eyes met, wanting terribly to reach out and clutch at him, and clasping her hands behind her back instead. 

Now, looking at the man on the video call, she could still recognize the boy there, in the intense blue stare and undercurrent of tension, and yet she could also see how unrecognizable he had become. If she hadn’t seen the subtle changes unfold month by month, year by year, she might not have believed it herself. 

“Relena?” His voice brought her sharply back to the present, and she shook herself slightly.

She smiled, “I was just lost in thought. I’m sorry. I should have asked, how are Duo and Hilde?”

Heero frowned minutely, “Hilde is, to quote Duo, ‘big as a whale.’ Inaccurate, but there is something concerning about how pregnant she is with the twins. She ate two jars of almond butter yesterday and then hugged me when I went and got her two more. She started crying into my shirt. It was… unsettling.”

Relena laughed, “I’m glad she has you there to bring her almond butter while Duo is at work. Is the junkyard still going well?”

“Hilde keeps calling it an ‘industrial salvage venture.’ She says it needs some class. They are doing very well. They spoke of buying a house.”

“That’s amazing! And it will be wonderful for the children. Duo told me once he wants five.”

Heero shuddered slightly, and took a sip of water. “I told Hilde that I would stay until the twins arrive. She’s afraid that Duo will be out with Howard and she’ll be alone. I told her I would stay, just in case.”

Relena leaned her chin on her hand, “You have a very soft heart under all that armor, Mr. Yuy.”

“Don’t tell.”

She grinned sweetly at him. “Or what?”

His eyes bore into hers. “I guess I’d have to kill you.”

Relena burst into laughter and was delighted to see the matching crinkles at the corner of his eyes. When their eyes locked together again, she wasn’t able to look away. She could hear the ticking of the clock behind her as loud as a heartbeat, and the minutes felt both as long as years and as quick as seconds. She felt as though she could count a thousand lifetimes well spent if she could just sit with him like this, looking into his eyes.

The ping of the vid-comm timer snapped her back to reality, but she was still full of the magic of the small, shared moments, stolen and sacred. Propelled into boldness by the call’s end, she pressed two fingers firmly against her lips and then hesitantly touched them against the edge of the comm screen. She couldn’t breathe as she watched him slowly put his fingers to his own lips, hold them there for a moment, and then press them against hers through the screen.

“I miss you,” she breathed.

“I miss you, too,” he whispered back.

* * *

4.

Relena was on the private shuttle back to Earth when the news announced the lockdown on L4. The virus was vicious, fast-moving, and so new that they didn’t even have a proper name yet. Relena had, of course, ended her visit with a tour of a hospice facility, and was therefore escorted to isolated quarantine at the nearest military hospital as soon as the shuttle landed on Earth. 

At first, she didn’t feel unduly alarmed; after all, this wasn’t the first time she had been exposed to pathogens and certainly not the first time she’d been kept in medical isolation for monitoring. It was relaxing, in a way, to have a small, enforced rest, and the first day passed quietly, as she caught up on a popular novel, poured over fashion magazines without guilt, and even napped. At the beginning of her second day, however, as her staff were slowly tested and released without symptoms, Relena found that she couldn’t rise from her bed without her vision blurring and bright spots gathering at the corners of her eyes. The doctors monitoring her vitals explained with concern that while the rest of her staff had tested negative and left quarantine, her results were inconclusive, and they wanted to run more blood-work, just to be sure.

By the next morning, she didn’t need to know the results of the new blood cultures to know that she was desperately ill. Even with the blurring in her eyes, she could see the small red blisters forming along her arms and hands. Her throat was cracked and itching and her eyes didn’t seem to want to open all the way. She pressed the small call button next to her bed, and there was a flurry of motion outside, monitors sounding, the ringing in her head growing louder each second. The door depressurized in a whoosh of air, and doctors and orderlies in hazmat suits began to quickly file in, testing her pulse, pushing her fringe away to shine a light into her eyes, and attach a row of small sensors along her neck.

She lolled her head from one side to the other, and tried helplessly to joke, “I think I need to take a sick day.” The army of gentle gloved hands reaching for her were the last thing she remembered for a long, long time.

When she woke, she was in a different room, even more tightly sealed than the one before.

Relena tried as hard as she could to keep track of the situation from the boxy and achingly slow tablet that the hospital had provided for her. To her relief, the lockdown on L4 seemed to have successfully contained _it_ from spreading, as hers had been the last shuttle to leave. They had named _it_ the “Varicella-4 Pox” and it seemed to be a highly contagious but also highly treatable variant of the varicella zoster virus. Most of those exposed, it was reported, recovered with little difficulty within the course of a week, and a vaccine was already being delivered to those on the other Colonies and on Earth. In some patients, however, the virus was serious, or even deadly. Relena saw with alarm that the projected recovery time was in the weeks and months for patients such as herself, if they managed to recover at all. Her normal sense of alarm was escalated by the newsfeed reports of her own illness. “Minister Darlian Stricken With 4-Pox,” was quickly replaced with “Former Queen Dead Before 30?” and “Colonies Already Mourning the Imminent Loss of a Fallen Icon.” Her lead doctor had watched the spike in her heart-rate every time she looked at the news and had summarily banned her from any more reading.

“It’s my job,” Relena had croaked, halfheartedly, but Dr. Flores had given her the evil eye from behind her hazmat helmet. 

“You are off-duty until you recover, do you understand?” Dr. Flores had ordered while plucking the tablet out of Relena’s weak grasp.

“I’m going to petition to cut your funding!” Relena called after her, but Dr. Flores had just waved a gloved hand at her. 

“Not if you die first!” she called back and Relena had even managed a weak laugh before settling back against her pillows and falling asleep.

She slept for days at a time, waking to relieve herself and to wash in the small, tepid shower to the best of her ability, before slowly making her way to the consultation window. There she was able to place her arm in a sealed chamber for blood extraction, and to talk with Dr. Flores and her nurses.

On the seventh day, a nurse woke her with the buzz of the monitor and a gentle query.

“Ms. Darlian, you have a visitor, if you are well enough to make it to the consultation window.” 

The unit had, in deference to her privacy, arranged her hospital bed, toilet, and shower facilities behind a curtain, with a long, narrow bench where she could sit comfortably and answer questions about her mental health or speak with any of the consultants who were not privy to the direct monitors around the room or the readings from the beeping bands attached around her arm and thigh. 

She had used the handrails along her bed to balance her way to the window the day before, and she found with relief that she was slightly steadier on her feet than she had been the day prior. The now routine night sweats had soaked her thin hospital gown, and she threw it off to loop a fresh one across her chest, thankful for the simple ties that allowed a modicum of decency. She still felt childlike and vulnerable in the short gown and bare feet, pale and itchy from the still-scabbing blisters.

Instead of a visiting specialist, she found Heero on the other side of the window. She was immediately mortified, tugging at the bottom of her lank hair and trying to hide the circles under her eyes and cracks around her mouth. The monitors on her arm beeped at her furiously.

His expression changed only minutely, but he looked stricken. His eyes flicked from her bare feet to her red-rimmed eyes, and then to the bench directly on the other side of the mirror. She slowly padded over, and, careful to keep her hospital gown tucked demurely around her, sat.

Heero cleared his throat. “They finally let me see you today.”

Relena tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “How long have you been here?”

“Six days.”

“I’ve only been here seven.”

“I saw the news bulletin. I would have come immediately, but,” he ducked his head to rub at his neck, “it took me a few hours to find which facility you were in.”

This small acknowledgment made her smile, even though the action stretched and broke the cracks of dehydration at the corners of her mouth. 

“How long are you staying?” she asked, unable to stop smiling, even though it hurt.

“As long as you’re here,” he replied, then looked at her, concerned. “Your mouth is bleeding.”

“It’s okay,” she said quickly, dabbing at her face with the back of her wrist. “Everything’s okay as long as you are here, too.”

Recovery was slow, and regulations required that she be recovered for two weeks and receive four negative blood tests before she left confinement. After the ravages of the first infection, she hoped to recover quickly, but each day was a struggle, and she barely felt stronger than the day before.

She spent most of her day on the bench by the window, with Heero on the other side. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes he read snippets of unrelated articles from the news or amusing messages from friends and family. Often, she dozed, and he sat beside her, keeping watch.

She had a relapse of fever on the fourteenth day, but she still pulled herself to the bench to lean her burning forehead against the cool glass. Heero sat on the other side, mirroring her posture, his cheek a reflection against hers as she took slow, ragged breaths. 

“I keep wondering what I will regret not doing,” she whispered, “if I die now.”

She closed her eyes and laid her arm against the window ledge, as he did the same, so their knuckles rested against each other through the panes. 

“I would have many regrets,” he said, finally. “Mostly involving kissing you.”

She rolled her head to meet his eyes through the glass.

“I love you,” she managed. “You have to know that. If I die, promise me you know.”

“I won’t say it back,” he said, a harsh note in his voice, “because you’ll take it as permission to die. You do not have permission to die on me, Relena.” 

She closed her eyes and laughed, an ugly, grating sound, “I guess I will have to live, then, won’t I?”

* * *

5.

She sat on the edge of her hospital bed, looking down at her loafers and the bottoms of her trousers as she waited while Dr. Flores tapped at her tablet. She was scrubbed clean and dressed, her hair washed and combed, and the last of the blisters a memory. The last three tests had come back clean, but it took four before they declared her ready to walk out the door. She felt jumpy and tense, holding her knees tightly to prevent her legs from shaking.

Dr. Flores looked at her, smiled, and took off her hazmat helmet.

“Congratulations, Minister Darlian. You are free to go… _with_ the understanding that you will be on medical leave for four weeks, and then you can work _only_ if you are feeling completely better, understood?”

Heero had stood up as soon as the pneumatic doors began to open and the mist of disinfectant and air washed down the hallway. As it faded, he saw her walking out of the room like a vision walking out of the clouds.

It didn’t feel as if it had been a decade since they had last kissed. The warmth of falling into his arms felt both excitingly new and completely familiar. Her feet didn’t get tangled in one another this time, and his hands gently found themselves combing through her hair. The warm jerk of her stomach made her curl in closer, to chase his lips with hers, to sigh against his mouth. Every tense muscle slowly let go of the knots they had been holding and her hands curled around his waist and up to hold onto the sharp edges of his shoulder blades. 

She rested her forehead against his, breathless. He didn’t release his careful hold on her hair and she balled her fists into the back of his shirt. Her face hurt from smiling, from kissing, from the shift from lines of pain or frowns of concern. She couldn’t stop the huff of delighted laughter that bubbled out of her chest, crushed against his.

“I love you. And I know you love me,” he whispered into the small, intimate, infinite space between their faces.

She smiled even wider, and felt it melting through her, down her face all the way to the tips of her toes.

“So kiss me,” she whispered back, and felt his smile against her lips.

**Author's Note:**

> So many thank yous!! Thank you to heartensoul and cookami for betaing, to heartensoul and MiakaMouse for constant cheerleading and encouragement, for ForgottenStorm87 for all the good vibes, and to RelenaForPresident, since she is to blame for the last section, because when I said "I don't know if I should write quarantine in a fic," she replied with an evil Kermit meme. <3


End file.
